


uncanny valley

by yoonbot (iverins)



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Drinking & Talking, Gen, Introspection, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-24
Updated: 2018-10-24
Packaged: 2019-08-05 20:34:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16374593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iverins/pseuds/yoonbot
Summary: In an ideal world, Seungcheol is Joshua's best friend.Or: Joshua and Seungcheol talk over a bottle of soju. Hypothetical Seungcheol and real-life Seungcheol collide.





	uncanny valley

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by [homemade dynamite remix](https://youtu.be/FUigCN9b478) by lorde feat. khalid, sza, and post malone. this fic is set vaguely in 2016, nearer the end of that year. 
> 
> i love lorde's music and i love seventeen – thank you so much mods for this event! ♡

Sometimes, Joshua feels like a stranger in his own body.

The lights are off when he blinks awake from his nap. Outside it's dark, and a truck is rumbling down their street. There's a compressed weight heavy in his chest, as if when he'd woken up, the universe he'd been dreaming about had collapsed back within him hastily. It makes it hard to breathe.

He's hungry, for one. Even when he can still taste the _jjamppong_ he'd had for lunch in his breath. His head, second, is still in the process of waking up, and he can only drag his feet out the door as he waits for the feeling to return to the arm he'd caught beneath his side in sleep – prickly, with a pins and needle sensation.

"Morning," Seungcheol says before Joshua's eyes adjust to the light. He's standing in the kitchen, next to the refrigerator, soju bottle on the counter and a half-filled glass beside it. "You were out for a while, huh?"

Joshua stares. He looks at the time on the microwave, and it's already half-past eleven. Seungcheol's drinking alone, which means that Jeonghan's out, which means that Jihoon's out too, which means – "Where's everyone?" he asks. His throat's dry from sleeping too long.

"In their rooms," Seungcheol replies. He brings the glass toward his lips, seems to rethink, and then puts it back down without taking a sip. "Vocal unit went out. To eat." _Without you,_ he doesn't add, but Joshua hears it in his voice anyway.

"Oh." His thoughts come slowly, like the regaining of sensation in his arm – through a multi-colored static, and then nothing.

Seungcheol maybe looks sorry for him. Seungcheol looked sorry a lot, but didn't always do a lot to prevent himself from having to look sorry in the first place. "Hey," he starts. "Do you wanna drink together?"

Joshua remembers staring at the crash zone of where someone had tried to launch a soju bottle into the kitchen trash bag once, missed, and he and Junhui'd waken up in the morning to the pieces splayed across the floor like green shards of monster blood. Joshua also remembers Jeonghan telling him two weeks later that it'd been Seungcheol, who smiles at him apologetically now, who's never outright apologized for it.

Maybe this is Seungcheol's convoluted way of making amends. Or maybe it's just Joshua, trying to give someone the benefit of the doubt again. Either way, he shrugs and says, "Okay."

 

 

 

In an ideal world, Seungcheol is Joshua's best friend.

It's not like Jeonghan wouldn't be, but where Joshua knows Jeonghan would listen carefully to all his thoughts, Joshua doesn't know what Seungcheol would do. Instead, what Joshua does know is that Seungcheol also confides in Jeonghan, and Jeonghan holds everything they tell him separately in some vault deep within himself, never to be shared with anyone else.

Hypothetical Seungcheol would do more than just rest his head against Joshua's shoulder when he was tired or wrap his arms around Joshua's waist when he felt restless during an interview. No – Hypothetical Seungcheol, in this distorted parallel universe of Joshua's daydreams, would be there when Joshua buried himself into his sheets out of homesickness, when Joshua fizzled out after a long day of practice, when Joshua felt like he wasn't good enough. And without fail, Hypothetical Seungcheol would hold his hand in his and say whatever Joshua needed to hear.

In real life, Seungcheol is eighteen when Joshua first meets him. He’s twenty when he officially, written-on-paper, becomes leader, and sometimes Jeonghan is only half-joking when he describes him as “twenty years too young” to be well-suited for the job.

In real life, sometimes Seungcheol says things or acts without consequence, and the rest of them hold onto these moments subconsciously, only to be dredged up when it happens again. Sometimes, Seungcheol is just as tired as the rest of them, and instead of being the leader Joshua thinks he should be, he retreats into his bed or – on rarer sometimes – snaps at someone over small things.

Joshua knows it’s not easy to lead. When he was eight, he’d been put in charge of a game during his church’s youth group, had cried in frustration when no one would listen to him, and that’d been the end of Joshua willingly taking charge of people other than himself. Of course it’s not easy, it’s just that –

“Seungcheol,” he’d said after one of those rarer sometimes. It was maybe a year ago. Seungcheol had been lying in his bed, an arm covering his eyes. One of the lights in the corner of the room flickered, threatening to go out, and two months later, Joshua remembers it actually did. “Can you – Is it ok if you –”

Seungcheol moved his arm under his neck, and craned his head to the side to look at Joshua. “Jisoo,” he started.

This is when Joshua remembers first thinking about his ideal world, where Seungcheol looks at him seriously exactly like this and tells Joshua how he truly feels. But where Hypothetical Seungcheol should be, there’s a blank space in Joshua’s mind, and he doesn’t remember how the rest of the conversation goes.

 

 

 

“Don’t be mad,” Seungcheol tells him.

Joshua winces as the soju slides down his throat. “I’m not,” he insists as it settles, hot, in the pit of his stomach.

And he’s really not, or at least he’s pretty sure. “You don’t get angry easily, do you Jisoo?” Jeonghan had noticed a week into their training, after they’d been lectured to by one of the managers for something that hadn’t been their fault.

“I mean –” And then he’d thought about how Jeonghan had been quick to cuss over the entire situation on their walk back to the dorm, trailing behind everyone else. “I guess not,” he agreed.

Joshua’s not sure if it’s actually true, or if he's just started ingraining facets of what people tell him he’s like into his personality, or if it's that half the time he reacts too slow, and by the time he’s thought of the perfect come back, five hours have passed and no one remembers what Joshua’s talking about.

So – hurt: maybe. Feeling like the odd one out: yes. Mad: no. “If you say so,” Seungcheol smiles, like he doesn’t believe him. There’s only the kitchen table separating them, but Joshua feels like the distance between them spans much further than that.

 

 

 

Everything said, Joshua and Seungcheol aren’t complete strangers to each other.

Seungcheol’s kind of like an overgrown child in the way that he’s fun to be around and that he latches onto things until they reluctantly let him be (prime example: Jihoon) or push him away (also prime example: Jihoon). He laughs at everything – even Joshua’s horrible impromptu raps and some of Wonwoo’s jokes that fly over everyone else’s heads – like he genuinely finds it all hilarious, and slings his arm over Joshua’s shoulder when it’s his turn to order Chinese and he remembers Seungcheol’s penchant for extra radish with his _jajangmyeon_.

“We’re the same age, aren’t we?” he’d brought up during a break in dance practice, when Joshua was still new and just barely keeping up. “I hope we become close, then.”

That night, Joshua found several bags of contraband snacks under his blanket. When Seungcheol had grinned at him in the mirror during practice the next day, Joshua had smiled back at the expense of getting lost for fifteen seconds in the choreography.

And Seungcheol’s the kind of person that’ll try to bend things his way, and the kind of person that’ll try to bend until those things give or break, whichever comes first. “You wanna go with us,” he’d insisted when Joshua had tried to turn his invitation to _noraebang_ down on one of their rare free days a couple months ago, and one of their rarer free days that Seungcheol wasn’t spending knocked out on his bed for eighteen hours. “C’mon, you love a good Park Hyoshin song!”

“Uh,” Joshua had said, not sure how to break it to him that Wonwoo’d been the one excitedly listening to the new album on repeat. “That’s okay.”

“Shuaaaaa,” Seungcheol hadn’t budged. “Come _on._ ” In the end, he’d given in only after Seungcheol wouldn’t stop following him around the dorm, whining about it.

And maybe it was the ease that came with training for so long, or maybe it was just his personality, but Seungcheol seemed comfortable running around with his heart on his sleeve while Joshua – still gangly after trying to put on muscle – was awkward, and hyper-aware of it to the point he’d make things worse imagining an onlooker judging him.

Everything said, Joshua and Seungcheol also aren’t strangers to the unhelpful one-on-one pep talks that they try not to bring up in casual conversation when the last one had started like this –

“I don’t think you understand,” Joshua told him after a moment of silence, harsher than he intended the words to come out.

The usual easy smile on Seungcheol’s lips tapered into a thin line. He’d looked almost sad through the frustration. “Well, I’m _trying._ ” Halfway out the door, he stopped. He didn’t turn around to face him like Joshua thought he would. “Are you?”

– And had ended with the broken soju bottle on the kitchen floor, Joshua sweeping up the pieces and wondering if it made sense that he felt like he and Seungcheol knew each other, but also didn’t know each other at all.

 

 

 

“Top three S.Coups,” Seungcheol says, apropos of nothing. Joshua watches as he leans back, touches the soles of his feet together so his legs are bowed in a butterfly position, and starts rocking from side to side.

His words are a little slippery. There could’ve been a better way to say them, and they’re not even phrased as a question. Joshua wonders if that's a thing you get to do when you're absolute oldest and absolutely in charge – demand. But if he thinks about it, dusting off the fuzziness around the edges of his thoughts from the alcohol, maybe it's just –

"Are you drunk already?"

Seungcheol huffs. "I asked the question first." He rubs at his eyes, the way the makeup artists at the shop tell them pointedly not to. His fingers linger on the pull down for a moment, exaggerating the pink, fleshy corners of his eyes.

So _now_ it's a question. Joshua, maybe a bit out of spite, hums into his shot of soju, considering, before gulping it down. “What if I asked you _top three Joshua?_ ” he counters. “How would you feel?”

“Easy.” Seungcheol flashes him a lazy grin. “Jisoo that freestyle raps for my birthday, eye-smile Jisoo, Jisoo that’s a good hyung to his dongsaengs.” He ticks off one finger at a time and holds up the three after he’s done, triumphant.

“Oh.” Joshua’s forgotten how good Seungcheol is at these kind of things.

Seungcheol's also impatient. “Top three S.Coups,” he repeats like the beeping of a microwave after a blessed moment of silence, rudely reminding everyone that Mingyu’s leftovers have finished heating up in the dead of night. He unfurls his legs from the butterfly to kick Joshua in the shins.

“ _Ow,_ ” Joshua frowns. He tickles the sensitive skin on the back of Seungcheol’s knees in retaliation. They’re both laughing by the time Joshua says, “Okay, okay, okay!” and the world tilts as Joshua gives it some serious thought. He doesn’t feel drunk enough for this.

“One, Choi Seungcheol.”

Seungcheol kicks him again. “Hey, that’s cheating!” he yells, scrunching his face as if he’s displeased. The laugh booming out of his chest betrays him though. “What does that even mean?”

Joshua honestly doesn’t know. “It means.” The finger he’s using to make his point swims in his vision. “That I like your real name. More than _S.Coups._ ”

“Okay,” Seungcheol hiccups. Joshua’s stuck on number two.

“Two,” he starts. He squints, searching for an easy way out. “Two...Seungcheol who gets teased by Seventeen.”

Seungcheol downs the rest of his glass. “I’m going!” he says jokingly, pretending to get up and wave goodbye to Joshua. Joshua laughs so hard he snorts.

“Fine,” Seungcheol says once he’s settled back down. Joshua shakes his head when he tilts the soju bottle towards his glass, but Seungcheol pours him another shot anyway. “Then what’s number three?”

What _is_ number three? He looks into the tiny shot glass as if it holds all the answers. Instead, it reflects back a tiny Joshua and a tiny Seungcheol sitting across from each other in a miniature fish bowl of a universe, the dim light of their kitchen twinkling between them.

 

 

 

When it comes down to it, Joshua’s a bad liar.

Go back to when Joshua remembers first thinking about his ideal world, where Seungcheol looks at him seriously exactly like this and tells Joshua how he truly feels. And where Hypothetical Seungcheol should be, Joshua remembers:

Seungcheol moving his arm under his neck, and then craning his head to the side to look at Joshua. “Jisoo,” he starts. He takes a slow breath before letting it go, off-cadence to Joshua’s. Where his voice is usually loud and full of laughter is quiet and shakiness.

“Do you think you’d be a better leader than me?” There's a sadness in Seungcheol's camel eyes, flickering on and off with the light that threatens to go out. Joshua isn't sure whether he should avert his gaze.

It's the first time Seungcheol confides in him. It's the only time Seungcheol's confided in him.

 

 

 

Three is –

Seungcheol reaching over the table for Joshua's hand and, upon finding it, smiling big enough that it'd break his face as he presses their clammy palms together. The both of them are still at least a little drunk.

It's –

Joshua, intertwining their fingers just as Seungcheol started to cry in that way he always insisted he hated, whispering whatever Seungcheol needed to hear.

And because this isn't an ideal world, or the distorted parallel universe of Joshua's daydreams, the Seungcheol holding his hand isn't and will never be Hypothetical Seungcheol and:

Today, Joshua's okay with that.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading ♡  
> [twt](https://twitter.com/bewearer) // [cc](https://curiouscat.me/715creeks)


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